In an exclusive chat with The Coin Headlines, Ritty Quinn, CEO, KOR Protocol, explains why AI has made the music industry harder to navigate for artists. Quinn also details how stablecoins are quietly fixing a payments problem that has affected creators for decades, and why the best crypto product is one where users never actually know that they are using crypto.
Before taking the helm at KOR Protocol in late 2025, Quinn spent time at ByteDance, built a career in Web3 marketing, and became an electronic music producer signed to Live Nation Asia. The interview with Quinn follows below.
You’ve said AI has solved creation but made talent discovery harder, can you give us an example of how that’s playing out for artists right now?
An artist can now produce a professional-quality track from a bedroom – create the artwork – edit promotional videos, and distribute the release without a large team. That is a huge opportunity but the same tools are available to millions of other people. The very obvious result is that, both the quality and the volume of content have increased dramatically.
An artist may have a great record and even build early momentum on TikTok or YouTube, but still have no clear route to the right label, manager, curator, brand, or booking agent. While strong audience signals still exist, but they are scattered across different platforms and rarely reach the people who can act on them at the right time.
That is one of the problems we are working on through Pacer, one of the applications built on KOR. Pacer is an AI-powered music career management platform that brings an artist’s audience and performance data into one place, then helps turn that information into an action plan around releases, content, outreach, and potential partners. The goal is not simply to show artists that a post performed well. It is to help them understand why it worked and what opportunity they should pursue next.
AI has lowered the barrier to making something good, but the barrier to being recognized by the right people at the right moment is higher than ever before. KOR is designed to change that.
You’ve argued entertainment might be crypto’s strongest consumer use case – what’s an existing entertainment pain point that crypto actually fixes better than any current alternative?
Rights and payments are probably the clearest example. A single song or remix may involve an artist, producer, songwriter, label, manager, and platform across several countries. Today, the ownership records, licensing agreements, and payments may all sit in different systems. It can take months to reconcile who is owed what, and creators often have very little visibility into the process. Crypto infrastructure allows the rights record, licensing terms, and revenue split to be connected directly to the transaction. When revenue is generated, it can be distributed automatically between the participants rather than waiting for several companies to reconcile spreadsheets, invoices, and bank transfers.
We are already applying that model through KORUS. Artists can release official music packs that fans are permitted to remix. The original artist retains their rights, the new creator receives attribution, and the ownership and revenue-sharing terms can be established when the remix is created.
mau5trap and Imogen Heap have both run remix campaigns on KORUS, generating meaningful revenue in a matter of days – in both cases earning more from a single campaign than they would from months of streaming. Tens of thousands of fan-created tracks were produced in the process.
The important point is not only the revenue. It is that ownership, participation, promotion, and payment operated as one connected process rather than four separate ones. KORUS provides artists with a commercially viable alternative to the streaming model.
Why stablecoins specifically for creator payments, rather than relying on existing payment rails artists already use like PayPal or direct label payouts?
Existing payment systems are useful, but they were not designed for an industry where one creative asset can generate thousands of small transactions across multiple countries and contributors. I have experienced the limitations myself. YouTube revenue can take months to reach me, and label royalties can take much longer. Every revenue source has its own threshold, payment timetable, intermediary, and reporting process. The problem becomes even more complicated when collaborators are based in different markets.
Stablecoins can move globally at any time and settle far more quickly. They also make automated revenue splitting possible. A payment can be divided between the artist, producer, label, manager, and collaborator as part of the transaction, rather than being manually distributed weeks or months later.
At KOR, the principle is that creators should still be paid in a familiar dollar-denominated format. They should not be forced to hold a volatile asset or understand the infrastructure underneath. Stablecoins are simply the payment rail that allows the money to move faster and more efficiently. The goal is not to replace every existing payment method. It is to provide a better option for situations where traditional banking creates unnecessary delays, fees, and administrative work.
You’ve said the most successful consumer crypto products might hide the blockchain entirely – does KOR’s roadmap include a version where users never see a wallet, a token, or a transaction at all?
Yes, that is central to how we think about mainstream adoption. Most artists, labels, managers, and brands are not interested in learning about wallets, gas fees, seed phrases, or different networks. They want to register their work, plan a release, collaborate, license content, and get paid. The infrastructure should make those actions easier without becoming another technical burden.
The experience we are building is one where a creator can sign up using a familiar login, connect their existing platforms, use the product, approve an action, and receive a payment. A wallet can exist behind the scenes without the user having to manage it directly. That is already reflected across KOR’s products. Someone using Pacer should experience it as a music career platform. Someone using KORUS should experience it as a way to create and remix music with official artist content. The ownership and payment infrastructure may operate onchain, but it does not need to dominate the interface.
That thinking is also reflected in our choice to build on Base. Base was designed around the idea of bringing the world onchain. Not by making crypto more visible, but by making it invisible enough that it stops being a barrier. Chain abstraction, familiar onboarding, and consumer-grade UX are built into the foundation.
That aligns directly with what we are trying to achieve. The blockchain is part of the infrastructure. It should not become the user experience.
What would an AI agent actually do for an artist managing releases or licensing – replace a manager, or just remove the admin work no one wants to do?
I do not think AI should replace a great manager. Human judgment, trust, taste, negotiation, and relationships remain essential in entertainment. The agent’s role is to remove repetitive work and make a small team more capable.
An artist may currently be using separate tools for analytics, release planning, audience research, content scheduling, outreach, and campaign management. The agent can bring that information together, identify what matters, and help execute the next steps.
Through Pacer, for example, an agent can identify which audience segment is growing, explain why a particular piece of content performed, recommend the right release window, build a campaign plan, and prepare a list of relevant labels, curators, or partners. Instead of the artist spending hours switching between dashboards, the system can produce a prioritized plan for what they should do next.
In licensing, an agent can identify a suitable track or piece of content, check whether it is available for a particular use, surface the relevant terms, and initiate the approval and payment process.
The artist or rights holder remain in control of the final decision. I see it as giving more artists access to the operational support that currently requires a full management team. The agent handles the administration and coordination, while the human team focuses on relationships, strategy, and creative judgment.
What’s the one thing artists tell you about the music business that investors and operators consistently get wrong?
They often assume that attention is the same as success. An artist can have millions of views, strong engagement, or a viral moment and still have no reliable income, no industry relationships, and no clear idea of what to do next. Platforms are very good at measuring how much attention a piece of content receives. They are much less effective at helping the creator turn that attention into distribution, representation, partnerships, bookings, or sustainable revenue.
The artist is expected to connect those dots alone. They have to interpret the data, plan the next release, find the right manager or label, pitch curators, negotiate deals, manage their rights, and chase payments across multiple systems.
That is why I am skeptical of products that give creators another dashboard without helping them act. When we built Pacer, the question was not, “How do we show an artist more information?” It was, “How do we tell them what matters today and help them do something with it?”
From the outside, it can look like creators simply need more reach. In reality, many already have reach. What they lack is a reliable path from attention to opportunity and from opportunity to sustainable income.
